Web Site of the Week: Four Word Film Review

Cons
Not much in the way of actual reviews. Searching limited to movie titles. Filtering system could use some work.

Bottom Line

If you're looking for honest-to-goodness film reviews, you might want to stick out your thumb and catch a ride to the next site. For flashes of haiku-like brilliance and good old fashioned time-killing, however, FWFR is tough to beat.

There are things in life that are supposed to be a chore: doing your taxes, going to the DMV, picking up dry cleaning. Reading movie reviews, on the other hand, ought to be a relatively painless, even enjoyable experience. Sure, services like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic help streamline the process a bit, compiling various reviews from publications large and small and consolidating them into a single read. But visiting those sites can still require a lot of clicking, and you'll be reading professional reviews with word counts that are occasionally in the quadruple numbers. When it comes to movies targeted at the split-second attention spans of the Internet generation, sometimes a motion picture's only worth four words.

Thisas the more savvy readers might have already gleaned from the site's own pithy four-word namewas the original idea behind Four Word Film Reviews (FWFR). The art of criticism is all well and good, but sometimes it doesn't seem worth sitting through Roger Ebert's latest prosaic diatribe in order to figure out whether to allot your hard-earned money to Saw III or The Grudge 2 (sorry, Sarah Michelle Gellar).

Over the history of the site, however, things have taken a decidedly different bent. As the site's own FAQ section puts it, "these days, the FWFR offers a mixed bag of content-- some summaries, some reviews, some a bit of both, but all of them valid comments in one way or another of the film in question." As good an idea as it may have initially seemed to encapsulate the combined output of dozens of people over the course of many years into something akin to a modern haiku, it's difficult, if not impossible, to execute consistently insightful abstracts that accurately portray a film's overarching themes, letting the reader know whether its worth an hour and a half of their life and a significant chunk of their paycheck (we're blowing upwards of $11 a pop in NYC, these days)all over the course of four words. Those who enjoy a good bit of brevity, alongside actual criticism, would do best to have a look at 20-word reviews, or even these massive 50-worders.

The art of summing up a film in a mere four words has become an art form in and of itself, making for 'reviews' that are enjoyable to scan through on their own merits, totally devoid of any kind of attachment to the films themselves. Reviews on FWFR most often shoot for cute/clever territory, consisting primarily of the puns ("Sonny, bloody, Sonny"The Godfather), the alliterations ("Bankrobbers bite Bolivian bullets"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), the rhymes ("Overdoses of neurosis"Annie Hall), or some combination thereof ("Sea son with salt"The Life Aquatic). Transcendence can be downright poetic ("Tense. Intense. In tents."The Blair Witch Project) or sublime ("D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T-A-R-Y"Spellbound). Occasionally, someone manages a brilliant one-worder, like the current top of the heap for Brazil ("1985") or the leader of the pack for Jaws: The Revenge ("Fin").

Reviewers register with the site and submit their reviews, which are then either approved (and posted on the site) or denied, based on a number of criteria, including word length (no reviews over four wordsgo figure), similarity to other reviews (no repeats), and interestingly enough, 'generalized reviews' (if you post "Totally awesome" about Citizen Kane, the odds aren't in your favor).

This makes navigating the site generally more pleasant, though according to a few irate members on the site's message boards, good reviews get rejected fairly regularly, and from my own experiences, it doesn't take too much browsing before you come across a few entries that leave you scratching your head. Filtering or no, those who are easily offended ought to avoid the various adult film reviews, and anything with potentially risqué subject matter, such as Brokeback Mountain, or even a film like JFK ( "Oswald - 1, Jackie O").

Users are then allowed to vote on the reviews, a maximum of one time per review, but as many reviews per movie as they choose. The reviews are then ranked according to the number of votes they've accruedif they get enough votes, they'll show up on Today's Top Reviews and eventually The All-time Top 100. The search bar at the top of the page allows you to look for films solely by title. Once actually on the film's page, a list of cast and crew appear, making it possible to view all of the films available with said member. You can also check all of the review written by a particular member by clicking their name beneath a review.

For a site designed with brevity in mind, FWFR is astonishingly and addictively time consuming. One you visit the site, you're almost certain to read a lot more than four words. Those looking for heartfelt movie criticism would do best to just avoid the site altogether; in four other words: Get words somewhere else.

Brian Heater came to PCMag in 2006, after working at Laptop Magazine as a staff writer. His writing has appeared in Spin, The Onion, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Press, The Oklahoma Gazette, The Metro...

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